GCC private schools came through the year better than feared, but Kuwait’s recovery is lagging

Private K-12 in the GCC has come through the year in better shape than operators feared in the spring, but the recovery is uneven across the region. In Qatar, premium school networks hit enrollment targets and normalized attendance after early-term wobbles, with single-gender Qatari nationals’ demand doing the heavy lifting. In Kuwait, tuition price caps, cost-of-living pressure on mid-tier expat households, and a rolling citizenship review have combined to push enrollments slightly down and squeeze margins.

Qatar’s recovery builds on a pattern we reported from the UAE last month, while Kuwait doesn’t. The UAE’s largest premium operators — Gems, Taaleem, Nord Anglia — went into September with retention and staffing intact and revised their conflict-era worst-cases down. Qatar now looks like a smaller version of that story.

A recovery paid for by Qataris

Premium operators in Qatar filled their seats, but with a different set of families than last year. All three Nord Anglia schools in Qatar hit their enrollment targets this year, and Sherborne Qatar reported 90% attendance across its five schools — the Education and Higher Education Ministry benchmark. But the composition has changed. “This year our admission status changed slightly, in that we had far more local Qatari students applying to come to the school and fewer expats,” Sherborne Qatar Chief Education Officer Jane Goldsack tells EnterpriseAM. “Less of the expat market actually joined us,” she says.

The growth is concentrated in single-gender schools. Sherborne’s boys school, launched two years ago, has grown from zero to 260 pupils. Its older co-ed campus sits at around 1.1k and its prep co-ed at 500-520 — stable, but not growing. “Our single-gender market is really taking off, mainly with Qatari pupils. The co-ed market has stayed stable,” Goldsack says.

Nord Anglia’s numbers tell the same story. Last year the group acquired Etqan Global Academy, a single-sex school that operates all-boys and all-girls academies in Qatar with a focus on Islamic values and Qatari heritage. It has added around 10% to its roll since the acquisition. “Parents are really looking for the single-sex environment far more than the cultural identity,” Nord Anglia Regional Managing Director Elizabeth Lamb tells us.

The expat-citizen divide could be a sign that the hit Qatar’s energy economy took is starting to show up in the school ledger. Nord Anglia runs a campus near the Ras Laffan gas fields, where a large share of parents work in the sector. Lamb says QatarEnergy has trimmed educational allowances for some workers there due to reduced gas exports on Hormuz disruptions “We have to provide great value for money to persuade [these] parents to keep their children in our school,” she adds.

Kuwait is going the other way

Kuwait is running the opposite play. Nord Anglia saw a slight enrollment drop across its British School of Kuwait and Sunshine Kindergarten campuses, which together still make up its largest school in the region, at more than 3.5k students. Regionally, the group’s student count rose 2% year-on-year. Kuwait dragged. “Many more people left Kuwait; some left because of the war, and others left because of the changing political situation with the government deciding to revoke citizenship,” Lamb says.

And unlike in Qatar, there’s no local-demand offset. Nord Anglia didn’t report a Kuwaiti-national surge picking up seats vacated by expat families — the base is shrinking on both sides at once. That matters for the recovery path: Qatar has a growing customer segment absorbing capacity on more single-gender offerings, while Kuwait doesn’t.

The citizenship overhaul, however, is the overarching drag as it compounds uncertainty in the market. The government has tightened naturalization rules to strip political rights from naturalized citizens, eliminate discretionary citizenship paths (long-term residency, marriage to Kuwaitis), end automatic transmission to foreign spouses, and expand state powers to revoke nationality for fraud, dual citizenship, or security offenses without judicial review. It has also cut roughly 5k teachers from the national system, Lamb says. “It’s hard to read that country and predict where the government might take things, or who will be allowed to hold residential visas to live and educate their children there,” she explains.

Same shock, different fee toolset

In neither country did an operator raise fees this year, but the reasons were not the same. In Qatar, it’s business as usual: The Education Ministry routinely holds fees flat, and Sherborne hasn’t applied a granted increase yet. In Kuwait, schools technically had headroom to raise but chose not to, because their customers are already squeezed.

“There is certainly margin squeeze in markets like Kuwait as operators could not always pass on rising teacher salaries, rents, and other expenses, especially in price-capped markets,” Junaid Ansari, head of investment strategy and research at Kamco Invest, tells EnterpriseAM.

And families aren’t waiting for the squeeze to ease. They’re going for more affordable options. Mid-level expat professionals whose housing allowances haven’t kept up with rents and school fees are being priced out of the premium tier. “Parents are actively moving toward established mid-tier operators that offer strong academics at 20% to 30% lower price points,” Ansari says.

REMEMBER- The UAE has more room to maneuver. Dubai’s Knowledge and Human Development Authority froze private school fees for the 2026/27 academic year after granting increases of up to 2.35% the year before — a fee squeeze imposed from a position of strength, not weakness. UAE operators told us in August they were absorbing it against solid earnings from the years prior, as well as a booming property market that has anchored expats in place. Kuwait has no such offset.

Teachers held, even when students didn’t

Teacher retention was surprisingly strong on both sides of the Gulf. A handful of younger expat teachers left Nord Anglia’s Qatar campuses at the peak of the conflict, but every school opened the academic year fully staffed. At Sherborne, all but one teacher returned after the summer.

But the UAE had it better. Gems reported turnover of 16-17% this year against a norm of 25% for international schools — its lowest in a decade. Taaleem lost 9% against a typical 15%, with only one percentage point tied to conflict-related departures. The Northern Gulf didn’t get quite that break: Nord Anglia’s Qatar and Kuwait recruitment cycle stretched to seven or eight months, up from the usual four or five, with some hires being made through the summer, something Lamb said was unusual for the group.

Expansion continues, but selectively

Despite resilient underlying demand, some school operators are keeping expansion plans firmly on ice. Rather than rushing to break ground on new greenfield campuses or import new brands, some players are focusing on maximizing yield and optimizing capacity across existing assets. “We are not rushing to expand our brand; instead, we are trying to improve our existing schools... we want to improve our existing provision rather than rushing to expand campuses,” says Sherborne’s Goldsack.

Others are focused on targeted, high-margin niches: Where portfolio expansion is occurring, some operators are doubling down on early-years education and localized acquisition targets. Nord Anglia, for instance, is still on offense, weighing an American-curriculum acquisition in Qatar — a segment it doesn’t yet cover there — and additional Sunshine Kindergarten sites in Kuwait City, where a recent refurbishment has drawn strong local demand.

Expansion plans in the UAE, however, are holding up more firmly. Gems announced an AED 2 bn expansion across Dubai and Abu Dhabi over the next three years. Taaleem is putting AED 1.5-2 bn toward growth, with five to six M&A targets lined up for its Kids First Group nursery arm and more premium school openings across its brands. Nord Anglia deferred a handful of UAE projects from FY28 to FY29 but still opened Harrow Dubai on time this September and expects Dubai British School Ghaf Woods and Harrow Abu Dhabi on schedule.

Supply-side pressure is building on Qatar at the same time. Goldsack notes that “more and more UK private schools are looking to shift to Qatar and the Middle East” as the UK independent sector comes under pressure at home as the market saturates there.

For investors, the long-term thesis for the education sector is intact, but deal execution has slowed. GCC private K-12 remains defensive and cash-generative, Ansari tells us, but transaction velocity has cooled. Due diligence cycles are longer, fee-approval regimes are getting more scrutiny, and enrollment pacing is harder to underwrite, he adds. And valuation multiples across smaller GCC economies have experienced a broad-based recalibration, though quality platforms in markets with fee flexibility continue to command a scarcity premium, Ansari says.

What to watch: How much of Kuwait’s enrollment drag turns out to be cyclical versus structural once the citizenship review settles; whether Qatari single-gender demand keeps growing at current rates or plateaus as capacity comes online; and whether Dubai’s fee freeze holds for a second year, which would begin to compress margins in the region’s most flexible market too.